1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates in general to tracking the effectiveness of online promotional activity and, more particularly, to tracking offline activity resulting from online user activity.
2. Description of the Related Art
The internet is a worldwide interconnection of computer networks that has become a global electronic marketplace of goods and services as well as of ideas and information. Millions of computers, from low end personal computers to high end super computers, are connected to the internet. The transformation of the internet into a global marketplace was driven in large part by the introduction of an information system known as the World Wide Web (“the web”). In essence, the web is a distributed database that provides wide access to a large universe of database records in the form of documents known as “pages”. These pages reside on web servers and are accessible via the Internet. The web is therefore a vast database of information dispersed across an enormous number of individual computer systems. Computers connected to the internet may access web pages via a program known as a browser, which has a powerful, simple-to-learn graphical user interface. One technique supported by the web browser is known as hyperlinking, which permits web page authors to create links to other web pages which users can then retrieve by using simple point-and-click commands on the web browser.
Web pages may be constructed in any one of a variety of formatting conventions, such as Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), and may include multimedia information content such as graphics, audio, and moving pictures. Any individual with a computer and a connection to the internet may access any publicly accessible page posted on the web. Thus, a presence on the World Wide Web has the capability to introduce a worldwide base of consumers to businesses, individuals, and institutions seeking to advertise their products and services to potential customers. Furthermore, the ever increasing sophistication in the design of web pages, made possible by increasing data transmission rates and computer processing speeds, makes the web an increasingly attractive medium for advertising and other business purposes, as well as for the free flow of information.
The advent of the internet as a global marketplace has given rise to new advertising techniques such as sponsored links, which for example, may involve a web page provider paying to have a link to its page displayed on a search engine web page in response to certain search requests. By agreeing to pay, the web page provider agrees to “sponsor” a link on the search engine page. One approach to the display of sponsored links involves associating the links to keywords and displaying a sponsored link in response to a search request that includes a keyword associated with the link. Typically, sponsored links are displayed in a prioritized order determined by the amount that a link sponsor has agreed to pay for such display in response to specific keyword search terms.
Pay-per-click is an example of one approach to payment for link sponsorship. Basically, a link sponsor agrees to pay an agreed upon amount for each click on a sponsored link by a visitor to the search engine site. Link sponsors who agree to pay more per click have their links placed in higher priority positions relative to other links who agree to pay less per click. One approach involves displaying sponsored links as a list in which higher paying sponsored links are positioned higher in the list.
Competitive bid auctioning has become a primary means to determine the price per click that sponsors agree to pay for sponsored link placement on a search engine web page, for example. One approach to competitive bid auctioning, for example, involves a prospective sponsor submitting a bid as to the amount per click it is willing to pay to have a hyperlink to its web site displayed on a search engine web page in response to a web visitor search request that includes a designated keyword. Sponsors in essence bid for keywords.
As a result, determining the value of individual keywords has become increasingly important The effectiveness of an advertising campaign involving sponsored links may depend upon high priority placement of a sponsored link in response to keywords likely to be used in a web visitor search request aimed at locating a source of products or services offered by the sponsor. The complex, competitive and real-time nature of bid auction-based key word search business models has increased the urgency for measuring which keywords actually result in conversions or profits to the link sponsor. A sponsor may bid on tens of thousands of key words in the course of an advertising campaign. The price per click resulting from this bidding process can vary greatly due to market forces.
Online advertising, such as pay-per-click sponsored links, is purchased with the intent of attracting web page visitors to a marketer's web site and causing that visitor to take some action of economic value to the marketer. That action or conversion could consist of a web page visitor filling out a lead form, purchasing a good or service from an online shopping cart, or taking some offline action such as placing a phone call or visiting a real world (not online) retail outlet store. The goal of the online marketer is to optimize its advertising campaigns to generate the maximum return on its ad spend. In order to optimize campaigns the marketer needs some way to measure the effectiveness of its advertising in generating conversions. By measuring the return on ad spend (ROAS) for each campaign, an advertiser can cut, increase or re-focus spending appropriately to maximize ROAS.
Currently, there are various solutions on the market that measure online conversions resulting from different types of online advertisement including key-word-level measurements. While these tools generally work well for marketers seeking only online conversions, there has been a need for improvement in measurement of offline responses such as phone calls resulting from online ads. More particularly, previous methods have been tried for tracing in-bound calls back to an originating online advertisement, but these have fallen short of providing a viable cost-effective solution for maximizing ROAS.
For example, in the past advertisers have attempted using dedicated landing pages with static tracked phone numbers to track visitors that call after clicking through from an ad. A problem with this method is that a separate landing page may be required per advertisement, which, in the case of search keywords can be in the tens of thousands or more. If the user clicks away from the landing page then the tracked phone number can be lost. Other methods have dynamically inserted a static tracked phone number contained in a tracking URL into the browsing session. However, since often there are many more keywords that an advertiser bids on separately than there are tracking phone numbers available to track, this method has proven commercially impractical for keyword-level tracking.
Another problem has been tracking user device activity on a web site. For example, in the past, web visitors typically were tracked from one web page to the next by storing an ID on the client device (e.g., via a “cookie”) or by passing an ID, such as a URL, from page to page via each consecutive link. Generally either approach to session tracking is acceptable as well as any other technique of session tracking known to those skilled in the art. A problem with the use of a “cookie” is that cookies often are blocked as undesirable. A problem with the use of URLs is that URLs can be modified by a user or forgotten, creating a break in the chain of activity from one web page to the next.
Thus, there has been a need for improved tracking including improved tracking of user device activity on a web site. The present invention meets this need.